The promise of the Mobile Moment

Every marketing pundit of late is talking about the mobile moment. According to Forrester Research it’s that magical instant when someone takes out her phone and gets exactly what she wants, in context.

It’s a great concept. But as an application developer, delivering on such a vision is non-trivial. Of course you must understand what your users want. But you must also predict their context and design an experience to deliver what they need at the right time.

Shorter App Sessions Means Engaging Users Outside the App

The real challenge for mobile developers is the pull to make app experiences shorter and shorter. In the desktop web world, designers thought about how to keep users on their sites for as long as possible. Deeper engagement (think time spent or total pageviews/session) was a critical measure. On mobile that’s simply not the case. A user’s context is changing all the time and the expectation of keeping a user in a session for more than a couple of minutes is unrealistic. But short sessions and the difficulty to anticipate the user’s context is often at odds with delivering a great experience.

So as a developers we need to think about ways to extend the user experience beyond the “session.” A user’s journey may start in your App but may very likely be completed at some future time when she’s not in the App at all. More often than not, this means reaching user’s with Push Notifications. (Sure you can email folks but email is not timely nor suited to mobile moment scenarios).

Making your Push Notifications Matter

One main consideration for designing a notification strategy has nothing to do with technology — it’s organizational. Many companies treat app development and design separate from engagement marketing. Designers, Product Manager and Engineers create the features, and marketers in some other part of the company drive desired usage patterns. It’s not the right mentality. A push campaign is an extension of an experience in the App. It is a feature just like any other. It should be thought through up-front and built into the experience from the outset.

But this is a topic for a different post….

A different consideration more relevant to mobile moments is all about technology. Almost all engagement strategies start with a historical look at what a user did.

• For all users who launched my app more than 2x in the last month — send a Push…
• For all users who viewed an article in the last 2 weeks — send a Push …
• For all users who abandoned their cart in the last week — send a Push …

Historical-based campaigns don’t deliver on the mobile moment

With historical-based campaigns you may sweep up users who performed an activity in your app days ago. You send them a Push as a continuation of their in-App experience and prod them to complete their next activity (purchase the item in their cart). But by the time they get your notification the context is gone. And in today’s world, if you send a notification one day or even an hour late, you might as well not send it at all.

Relying on historical-based campaigns is not the fault of marketers. The technology has let us down. Almost all mobile app engagement tools (mobile marketing automation suites) were built to let people analyze what happened in the past and engage users based on prior activity. People use what they’ve been given.

But mobile moments don’t happen in the past. They happen now. They happen when a user completes an activity in your App, or when they don’t. Mobile moments are relative to user’s activity not relative to some arbitrary time period in the past.

At CleverTap we call this operating in User Time.

Take the classic cart abandonment scenario. A user adds an item to cart but does’t purchase. You want to send them an offer and entice them to buy. Traditional engagement marketing tools let you do this — but the message will probably get there too late — like a day too late. The mobile moment is gone after 15 or 20 minutes.

What about another example where you sign-up for a Meet-Up in the future or buy tickets online for a movie next week (say Fri at 9:00pm). If we think in terms of user activity, or User Time, the experience you’d create looks something like this:

• one day before send recommended restaurants near the theater with availability prior to the show
• day of the movie send the address and directions
• 2 hours after ask to rate movie/theater
• 2 days after send upcoming recommendations that reflect user preference

These activities happen in User Time (relative to the show time) and not some some arbitrary historical time period. The technology underlying your engagement tools needs to support User Time as well.

• Send a notification to a user immediately after they perform an activity
• Send a notification 5 min after they did one activity but not the next (cart abandonment)
• Remind user of an event relative to it’s start time

We built CleverTap from the ground up to power mobile moments in User Time.